


the world keeps spinning

by ofstarsserene



Category: His Dark Materials (TV), His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
Genre: F/M, don't ask me about the logistics of this au, it's nothing too severe but if you are sensitive to this topic please tread with caution, this au cost me my last brain cell, warning - implied / referenced self-harm
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-03
Updated: 2020-08-03
Packaged: 2021-03-05 22:28:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,365
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25692835
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ofstarsserene/pseuds/ofstarsserene
Summary: an au where asriel is an immortal being known as a weaver, and, as he weaves the tapestry of lives, one human in particular catches his attention.
Relationships: Lord Asriel/Marisa Coulter
Comments: 6
Kudos: 17





	the world keeps spinning

**Author's Note:**

> this AU has been taunting me since February, and now it’s finally finished

Weaving human lives is like brewing potions made of sounds and stories, of fragrances and colors. Some lives gleam with hope, others are tarnished with sorrow, and there are those who will burn your hands with anger, or those that will blind you with excruciating pain.

Weavers are known to go mad, turning into golden dust that sweeps across heavens like ashes from funeral pyres.

But Asriel is an excellent Weaver. He spins centuries into elaborate tapestries, an endless flow of mortal lives running in front of his eyes that never tire. A pearl for every child born. A bloodstone for every last breath. His spindle is constantly at work, and silver threads under his fingertips are singing with thousands of human voices and thoughts. Asriel doesn’t listen to them. It’s not his purpose. His mission is spinning and weaving, smooth fabric falling to the floor in graceful waves. A pearl – and a new silver thread appears. A bloodstone – and you cut the thread with skill and precision, and you put a gemstone to its end, forever locked in place.

His scissors cut another silver thread, and another, and another… He knows the Authority will be pleased. It is the fate of mortals, and thus it shall remain for eternity.

***

His tapestry is dirty with something that looks like cinder, and while at first Asriel tries to blink it away, thinking it only a silly illusion, it doesn’t disappear. It’s one of the threads, he notices. A thread covered in black dirt, even though it was fine just moments ago. A thread that belongs to a young girl – and a bloodstone that appears to seal her fate.

He doesn’t question his craft, but this – this is something unusual, and a frown creases his immortal brow. He hesitates, because for the first time it doesn’t make sense. A stone should end a thread of pure silver, not something stained with sticky black soot – so Asriel continues weaving, a tiresome tingling pestering him at the back of his mind.

When the Authority arrives, Asriel doesn’t sense it like he usually does.

“What is it, my child?”

Asriel’s heart drops when the voice is ringing in his ear, but his hands are steady, a new pearl appearing in between his finger and his thumb.

“The thread,” he whispers, his throat hurting from misuse. “The girl. It’s not right.”

When the Authority sighs, it’s something akin to chill northern wind making a round across the room. Asriel’s lips form an involuntary grimace of discomfort, which he hides in the matter of seconds.

“The girl wants to end it herself,” the mighty voice sounds weary, distant, and bored. “They do this sometimes, mortals. It’s none of your concern. Still silver under the soot. Cut – your tapestry misses a stone.”

The Authority vanishes as swiftly as they appeared, and Asriel obediently takes the scissors in his hands. He shivers, for they are icy to the touch, and he clicks them in the air a time or two, his eyes locked onto the black-stained thread, but his fingers go suddenly numb…

For the first time in eternity Asriel hesitates, and the bloodstone destined for the girl falls to the floor, the scissors following its path with a loud clank.

Asriel continues weaving, his nails scratching at the soot every time the thread catches his fingertips. It bends and it tangles, which his threads never do, but Asriel is persistent in his vigor. He wants this darkness gone. It’s not right. It’s not fair.

The soot gets under his fingernails, and Asriel sees _her_ – a wretched little thing, no more than eleven years old, clutching something to her chest. No, not something – a living thing. Peculiar shape. An animal.

Not clutching it. Suffocating it, her trembling hands squeezing the creature’s neck.

…No, not just the creature. It’s hurting her too, as the girl struggles to take a breath, her mouth fruitlessly gasping for air.

It would be so easy to cut her life now. She doesn’t want it. She doesn’t need it. Asriel is not supposed to understand. But it’s just not right. He makes his choice. He has to try.

Asriel tugs at the tarnished thread with unusual tenderness, his touch almost a caress – and the girl breaks into violent coughing and lets her animal go. The creature – the monkey, its fur shining glimmering gold – darts across the room, away from its mistress, screeching…

The vision is over, and the thread is silver again, and Asriel lets out a heavy breath that echoes around the chamber like faraway thunder.

***

A creature like him does not feel the passage of time. Humans lead fleeting, insignificant lives, and sometimes Asriel cuts threads without even noticing. It’s a steady rhythm – a certain harmony that rules the cruel universe. And yet one thread in particular feels strangely familiar in his hands, and, as his fingers brush over it time and time again, Asriel sees glimpses of a life so humanly fragile and fast, he can barely keep up with it.

A girl turns thirteen, and she nibs at her cake when her mother envelopes her in a clumsy hug (and Asriel feels that the scene is lacking something important, something crucial to human happiness).

It’s the same girl, and the same lack of essential human emotion – only this time she is older, in a delicate white dress and with flowers in her hair (a wedding, Asriel thinks, this must be it, but it feels cold and bland, and Asriel feels this is not how it’s supposed to be).

Was that a year? A two or three? Asriel doesn’t know how many have passed this time, does not fully understand how time works, but the girl seems different somehow, surrounded by books, and papers, and strange little machines, and her eyes are blazing with passion and curiosity.

Marisa. Marisa. _Marisa_.

He learns her name, and sometimes, when he whispers it to himself in an empty room, he feels like her thread in his hands is shining brighter than the others.

***

The nights at the chamber are pitch-black and silent. Even Asriel’s spinning wheel seems sleepier and quieter. It makes no difference to him – his fingers move instinctively, and he may as well be blind and deaf, for Asriel knows his purpose, and neither eyesight, nor hearing are crucial to his task. In the perfect darkness of the night, “loneliness” is just a word to him, void of any feeling or consideration on his part.

Yet, now his eyes more and more often dart to one of his threads, softly glowing and timidly sparkling between his fingers. This glow he comes back to over and over again. This glow teaches him longing for someone’s presence.

Asriel tugs at the thread – reluctantly, tenderly, carefully. With each tug a new image forms, a new sound comes echoing. He has learned to recognize her smile, her eyes, her laughter, and her tears. Especially tears. Marisa Delamare (or is it Coulter now?) rarely cries, but when she does, it’s too heart-wrenching and too ugly a sound for someone so young and so beautiful. Her rage and her screams are something Asriel got used to, but her muffled sobs butcher Asriel’s heart with a knife.

One night Marisa’s thread is too bright, too hot to touch, and when Asriel twists it between his fingers, he is hit with a suffocating wave of a dark, dangerous feeling that humans call desperation. One more tug, another twist – and there she is, clawing at her own skin until she bleeds, her every scream ending with a sob. It takes Asriel a moment to see that the room around her is on fire, sleek flames licking at her feet and reaching for her dress.

His reaction is as natural and instinctive as his craft. _Chase away the fire. Shelter the girl. Shake her out of it_.

“What the hell do you think you are doing? Stop it!” Asriel drags her away from roaring flames, takes her by her shoulders and shakes her with all his might, and only when Marisa starts kicking him in the chest with her fists, trying to escape his grasp, does he realise that he is as real to her as she is to him. Which cannot possibly be.

“Let me go!” Marisa is surprisingly strong, and holding her in place is a strenuous task. “I want this to be over. Please…”

This is a dream. It must be a dream. For what else can explain the fact that her fists land painful blows or that her head is heavy on his chest once she finally calms down and sobs in his embrace? Asriel rubs her back as he looks around, trying to make sense of his surroundings. The flames died out on their own. The room is no room anymore, more like a space with no end and no beginning, a void which pulsates in accordance with Marisa’s breathing.

It's her dream, her horrid nightmare (how many times has she experienced this?), and Asriel has no idea how he came to be here. From the corner of his eye he spies something slowly moving towards them. A golden monkey, looking as tired and as miserable as Marisa, the same creature Asriel saw her strangling all those years ago. (Is it a part of her then?)

“What is this?” Marisa’s voice is unusually close, and a second later she pushes him away, and her eyes are frantic, as she searches his face for answers he cannot give. “Who… who are you?”

It’s a question Asriel has never thought of before. Thinking has never been his purpose.

“I’m… Asriel,” is the only thing he can say with any amount of certainty.

“What? You don’t make any sense.”

Something brushes his leg, and when Asriel looks down, he sees her monkey wrapping its tail around his calf.

 _No_. Thinking is not his purpose. Feeling is not his purpose. His place is at the wheel. It’s not right.

“I have to go,” he whispers, for his only salvation is in running.

“Wait!” – but he disappears before her eyes, and next thing he knows, he is back in front of his tapestry of souls, and his heart is about to leap out of his chest. What was that? He couldn’t possibly… 

Marisa’s thread is still glowing in his hands. He tugs at it once more, and there she is, staring into the void of her dreams, stroking her monkey’s fur, as the creature clings to her neck. She is silent for a while. When she finally speaks, it’s but a whisper, yet Asriel can feel it in his bones.

“…Asriel.”

He clutches her thread in his fist. This cannot be.

Perhaps he should have ended her life when he had the chance. Where is her bloodstone now, when his head is about to burst because of the fact that she exists?

 _Rip it out. Get rid of her_.

Thinking is not his purpose. Feeling is not his purpose. A Weaver must simply tend to his tapestry when need arises. Asriel pulls the cursed thread, reaches for his scissors, and damn the consequences – but a sudden burst of pain makes him snatch his hand away. A few drops of red fall on the floor next to him.

For the first time in eternity Asriel bleeds.

***

From that night on, everything around Asriel is too loud, too intense, too much. His task is a constant struggle now, his hands unusually slow and easily damaged, his senses heightened to the point when Asriel thinks he has truly gone mad, like so many Weavers before him.

When the Authority arrives, it makes Asriel’s head hurt and his eyes water.

“You are unwell, my child,” they speak in a tone that gets under Asriel’s skin and boils his blood. “You make mistakes, you hesitate. It’s time you had some rest.”

“No,” Asriel blinks away the tears and stubbornly continues his newest pattern of threads, “this is where I belong.”

He pricks his finger on a wheel, and he has to suck the blood, the metallic taste of it almost familiar after so many times. The Authority shakes their head.

“You are not irreplaceable, Asriel,” they sound angry and disappointed. “Go. It is my wish.”

Disobedience is not an option when it comes to the will of the Authority, and Asriel does as he is told. This is how it’s always been.

 _The Authority_ , rings in his head. _The Authority. The tapestry. The thread_.

 _Marisa_.

 _Marisa_ – and out of the blue it’s all simple and clear.

 _Marisa_ – and Asriel knows this is his home no longer.

When midnight comes, he sneaks back into the weaving chamber, and even the glassy eyes of a new Weaver cannot dissuade Asriel from what he has decided to do.

The scissors are sharp, and the cut is deep, and his hand bleeds all over the tapestry. The scream that comes out of Asriel’s mouth is as animalistic as a creature that appears before him, connected to him by a silver thread. A snow leopard, that roars in his face, before Asriel’s world goes dark. 

The darkness welcomes him into its lair as a long-forgotten mother, and Asriel’s last thought is of Marisa whispering his name in the aftermath of her nightmare.

***

When Asriel wakes up, he is no more blinded by the light of the heavens. He awes at the stars above his head instead, watches as the heavenly city disappears from view, hidden behind a myriad of colours that pierce the night sky. It’s beautiful. Asriel thinks this is what freedom must feel like. 

His leopard nuzzles at his palm, and it’s a connection that he never even realized he missed all these damn centuries. It’s a new life coursing through his veins, and for the first time in eternity (which is for him eternity no more) Asriel laughs, and snowy mountains around him echo the sound of his newly found mortality.

He has no idea where and how he’s going to find Marisa, but find her he must.

And when he does, Asriel will make sure she whispers, and screams, and moans his name again.


End file.
